Author: Chad Carter

Christmas in June–My new setup

It had been four years since I bought the Dell M1730 laptop.  At the time I was looking for a portable server.  I wanted a machine that I could do video editing and game development on as well as my core web and silverlight development.  I wanted to be just as efficient “on the road” as I was at my desk.  I’ve always enjoyed full keyboards and fumbled with the smaller laptop keyboards.  So I was happy with my 4GB machine with dual NVIDIA GeForce 8700GT (258MB) SLI.  It served my purposes well.

However, I reformatted the thing about 4 times in the last 4 years.  I tried the original 32bit OS (Vista at the time) and the 64bit and went back to 32bit.  Then I tried 64bit Win7 and backed back down to 32bit Win7.  Besides trying to determine if my machine performed better as a 32bit machine or a 64bit machine I am constantly installing beta software.  Stuff gets left behind and this adds to my need for needing to pave the machine.  Using VMs would have helped here but my machine was already struggling on the main OS with everything I was throwing at it much less if I started allocating RAM to VMs I was running.  Plus with Windows Phone 7 development the emulator runs in its own VM and I couldn’t run the emulator inside of another VM.

I typically run with 30 or so Outlook email windows opened along with tons of web browser windows opened.  I’ll be on twitter and see some link and I’ll click on it so it goes into my “queue” of things to look at later.  My outlook email windows are my “todo” queue for the most part.  Then I’ll have multiple Visual Studio instances going for the different projects I’m working on.  My machine was constantly running at 85% or higher RAM usage.   This, of course, causes a lot of paging in the system and thrashes the hard drive.

Besides the memory cap, the biggest issue I had with the machine was the weight of the thing.  I didn’t travel that much 4 years ago.  (And still don’t travel a lot compared to a lot of folks.)  But when I did travel I had to take that 12lbs machine along with the 6lbs power cord and carrying that around a city or in an airport on a shoulder bag wasn’t very fun.  I finally found a laptop bag that held my 17” screen but I kept breaking the straps from the weight of the thing.

Recently, we were given an iPad. It is a nice toy but I could never be productive on it since I use Outlook and Visual Studio constantly.  Web browsing is nice, but it isn’t enough for my job.  It is a great gaming and entertainment device, but (in my eyes) it is a toy and not something I could use in a business setting.

However, having that little tablet device made me say “This is what I want to do my production work on.  I’m tired of lugging around the ‘20 lbs of equipment’ whenever I need to go somewhere.”  As much as I wanted a tablet device I knew that I wasn’t going to be productive daily if I just used a tablet.

Anyway, it came time for me to pave my M1730 again and instead of doing it I decided I’d take the time to determine what machine(s) I’d buy to be most productive.  So I knew I wanted a lot more RAM so I figured I’d start there.  I started my search on newegg.com.  I have found them to have the best prices overall.  So I started selecting the parts for the machine I was going to build and was surprised to see that 12GB of RAM was only $150.  So I picked up two of those to obtain 24GB of RAM.  I also wanted a great processor so I picked up the Intel i7 990X which has 6 physical cores (12 logical cores) and a EVGA FTW3 Motherboard to support that chip and the RAM.  I bought a 128GB SSD as my primary drive and a 3TB drive for my storage. I also have 2 1GB GTX 560 Ti Graphics Cards with SLI.  I’m happy with the setup.

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I had to start over with my my server at home because I had everything installing to my 128GB drive. My concern was I would fill it up pretty quick if I had all my temp files and my documents, etc all pointing to that drive. So I found a trick that when you are first installing Windows when it gets to the screen where it asks you to create a user name you can hit SHIFT+F10 to open the command prompt. I then used robocopy to copy the program files, program data, user folders, temp folder to the HDD. I think did a mklink –j to make a permanent link to the HDD. So the system thinks it is going on C:Program Files.. (or whatever) but it is actually going to D:Program Files.  This is leaving my main drive empty enough for my liking.

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Even with buying all of this I still had just enough money in the machine buying budget to also get the tablet device I had been looking at – the ASUS EP121. This Windows 7 slate device is the most powerful on the market. It has a 12” screen and comes with a Bluetooth keyboard which is really great. The battery life lasts anywhere from 2 hours to 4 hours depending on what I have running. Most of the time I’m near a outlet or will be within that time frame so that isn’t a big deal to me. It has a 64GB SSD drive and 4GB of RAM. I asked Newegg to notify me when stock became available. I had been looking at this for the last month and no one had it in stock. While I was at CodeStock I got the email from Newegg and placed the order immediately. The site was out of stock again with 20 minutes.

My goal here was to be super productive at my home office where I spend most of my time.  At the same time I wanted to be able to work if I traveled to the office or at a conference or where ever. 

The thing that surprised me most about this tablet was the handwriting recognition.  The Wacom Digitizer stylus is awesome.  I wasn’t expecting to use it, but I find myself going to it as much as the software keyboard when I don’t have the Bluetooth keyboard handy.

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I knew I would be able to do XNA development on the tablet but I wasn’t expecting the tablet to be able to support the HiDef profile inside of XNA. Most laptops don’t support it as it requires a pretty decent graphics card.  I was able to run all of my demos I did at CodeStock on this thing after the fact.  The only thing I need now is a Mini HDMI to VGA adapter for when I need to hook it up to a projector and I’ll be set. It is crazy that I was able to get both of these machines for the same amount of money I paid for the M1730 four years ago.

In addition to having these great machines, I just received the HTC Trophy Windows Phone 7.  I use Verizon so I had a long wait when it came to getting a Windows Phone 7.  So far, I like it.  I had a Samsung Taylor developer prototype phone and the screen on that seems to be more crisp.  I had used the blue accent on the dark background and the blue is much deeper on the Samsung and almost a baby blue on the HTC.  Not a big deal, just something I noticed.  The other thing I have to figure out is how to get my games on my new phone.  Seeing “try and buy” instead of the familiar Xbox 360 “Download Again” prompt is scaring me from clicking it.  I’d hate to pay $12 for Harvest.  $6 was plenty, thank you.  So I’ll do some research on that later.

For now, I’m happy that I have my 3 machines ready (for the most part).  My powerhouse machine I’ll use most of the time, my Slate that I’ll use when I want to “chillax” with the family or I’m at a conference or offsite and my phone for all the times in between.  The phone I had before was a Motorola Razr.  This is my first smart phone.  Yeah, I’ve been waiting a while …

So, for me it is like Christmas.  It wasn’t really planned for all of these things to come together at one time, but I’m glad it worked out that way.  Now, I need to determine the best way to keep my documents in sync…

Chad Carter 2 Comments

SIEGECon 2010

I had the opportunity to speak at SIEGECon 2010. SIEGE stands for Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo.  Pretty cool acronym. 

So I drove down to Atlanta on Thursday, September 30th. It is about 300 miles/5 hours from the Greensboro area. I arrived Thursday night late. I stayed at a hotel down the road since it was about half the price of the hotel where the conference was being held. It was only a 3 minute drive, so no big deal there.

I spent an hour trying to get my Xbox 360 on the hotel wireless since I would need it for the XNA session I would be giving on Saturday.  After trying a few things with no success I went to bed around 1:30.

I was up early to attend and the WP7 training with Glen Gordon and help answer any questions on XNA.  The WP7 event was 4 hours of tutorials that was not really part of the actual conference.  There were over 200 high school students brought into sessions that Friday morning.  There were probably 30 that rotated in and out of the WP7 sessions.  Glen did a great job with the presentation and I heard several folks talking very excitedly about the phone.  There was even one person who sent a message to his friend in an Adobe session to come over to hear Glen’s presentation. That was cool.

After the WP7 tutorials, we had a nice lunch provided.  I was able to talk with Andrew Greenberg, the conference’s organizer about the conference.  We had a good conversation about community and the conference.  He introduced me to Noah Falstein, one of the key note speakers for the event.

After lunch, I went to a deserted room to try and get my Xbox 360 on the hotel’s WiFi.  I was making the assumption that if I could get it to work in one hotel, it would work in the other. The problem is that hotels shove a proxy in between the machine and the internet.  This redirects traffic to the hotel’s agreement page (where you may have to actually pay for access).  This is all done through a web browser.  When connecting through a laptop this is no problem.  Enter the credentials in the web form and you are on your way.  The Xbox 360 has no browser and that is the problem.  So I messed with that for another hour and half before the room was being occupied for an upcoming session.  I didn’t make any headway and packed everything up and put it in the car and then headed to the first actual session of the conference.

The first official session of the conference I attended was “Speed Dating”.  No, I wasn’t looking for a date.  I’m happily married.  This was a session to network. It was a lot of fun and I was able to meet a lot of folks in a short amount of time.  I met teams that were just starting up and had a game concept together but nothing else to teams that had everything and were looking for networking support. I met graphic designers, other developers, audio gurus and even cartoonists. It really was a great way to kick off the conference.

nolanbushnellAfter the first session was the keynote.  The keynote speaker was Nolan Bushnell, who co-founded Atari, founded Chuck E. Cheese and founded uWink.  I’m a huge Atari fan. I have wanted a retro Atari shirt for the longest time, but none of those “70’s/80’s” stores ever carried them.  Once I found out that Nolan was going to be the keynoter, I jumped online and ordered 3 Atari shirts.  One is actually a Pong shirt with an Atari logo and the other two have the Atari logo with the word Atari underneath it.  I wore an Atari shirt each day I was there.  I was proud of my nerdyness.  I actually wore my Pong shirt on this day since Nolan is credited for creating Pong.  The actual development was done by his co-worker, Al Alcorn.

Nolan’s speech was excellent.  He had images from the early days when Atari created Computer Space.  He talked about some of the specs for the Atari VCS 2600.  For example, it only had 128 bytes of memory.  That’s bytes – not kilobytes! 

For those that remember the original starter kit that came with XNA called SpaceWar.  That was created after the first ever computer game.  SpaceWar! ran on multimillion dollar mainframes and Nolan played it while he was in college. That is what inspired him to create Atari to sell coin operated games.

Nolan spent some time also discussing some Economic Models like Subscriptions, Buy the box, Download, Free to play / pay to win, and Ad Supported when it comes to games and software in general.  He talked some on Augmented Reality and the future of games.  It was a really interesting talk.

There were some interesting quotes I jotted down while he spoke:

“You should fire 5 to 10% of your people every year.” – I have read of GE doing this. And then seeing the Netflix PowerPoint to their managers on culture and business last year, I really agree with this philosophy.

“Home schoolers get into colleges easier than public school and that is wrong.” – We homeschool our children, but I didn’t see this as a slam to homeschooling based on how he was talking, it was definitely a slam on the public school system.  He definitely thinks that the “problem with schools is 1/3 of the teachers are dumb as a post.”  I believe that is what led into his comment about firing 5 to 10% of employees every year.  I’m not opposed to the public school system.  I think a lot of the success behind home schools comes from the ratio involved.  1:1 or 1:4 is much better than a typical class room of 1:30.  1 teacher for 30 or more students just becomes a lot of crowd control.  People don’t learn the same way.  Folks get left behind because they didn’t understand something that was presented.  When a teacher only needs to worry about a few students they can take time to make sure the student understands before moving on.

Another quote of his was “Privacy – Get over it.” – He mentioned this when talking about Mobile games and GPS / Location aware apps.

“You are smart. Procreate.” was another quote from his talk.  He then went from this into the best quote from the session:

“The best life is a life of balance.”

After his keynote a few of us were able to chat with him afterwards around a table. I was amazed by how he made himself available.  During his talk, I noticed when he talked about Nintendo’s Wii and PlayStations Move that he didn’t mention Kinect for the Xbox 360.   I also noticed he didn’t mention Windows Phone 7 after talking about Android and the iPhone.  Around the table, I asked him if he had any thoughts on WP7.  To my surprise he suggested to not spend any time on that device.  I asked why and he thought that carriers weren’t going to carry the phone.  It seems to me they are, although Verizon and Sprint will be early next year.  Unfortunately, I must disagree with him on this point, but it was definitely awesome to get to talk to him and hear insight on many different subjects.

That evening there was a party by the pool area, but it was entirely too loud so I went back to my hotel to test out the 360 some more for my presentation the next day. Everything worked on the first try, but my TV Card had a device driver failure but I could still use it. 

The next morning, I showed up early to get 360 going in the room I was going to speaking in. I didn’t get a chance to get it setup before the first session started, so I left the 360 in place (behind the podium) and packed up the rest and headed to the Augmented Reality session.  This was a great session and seeing the stuff Georgia Tech and SCAD did with the android and a cardboard city on the table was amazing. 

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Unfortunately, I had to leave early so I had enough time to setup for my session.

With the 30 minutes between sessions I had just enough time to get my environment setup for my talk on Xbox 360 Programming with XNA.  The 360 was online and I was able to launch XNA Game Studio Connect.  (This was done by sharing my wireless connection on my laptop.) The video card was doing its job (although the error message was on the screen, but I just moved it down toward the taskbar.)  PowerPoint was queued, VS2008 and VS2010 were loaded with my projects.  Projector was display my laptop correctly (for the most part).  So I was really happy.  This had a lot of moving parts and many things could have gone wrong. Fortunately, nothing did.  I had a lot of material to cover and an hour wasn’t really long enough and so I didn’t really get to show too many demos.  However, everyone that talked to me afterwards couldn’t believe just how easy it was to get up and going on the 360.  Mission accomplished.  Now I was going to be able to enjoy the rest of the conference without worrying about my presentation not going to plan.

I put all of my gear back in my car and then grabbed some lunch. The boxed lunches at this conference were nice.  After lunch, I hit up my first Serious Games session.  I was hoping to be able to meet some folks in this area as I’d love to be able to do more game development in the business world.

David Warhol taught the session The Five Ms of Serious Game Development.  It was a great session with student participation. We went through the exercise of designing serious games based off of budget and other restrictions.  It was a great session and I learned a lot.

The next session I went to was also on the Serious Games track and discussed 3D in Serious Games. It was a good session as well. There was some mention of SecondLife and OpenSim.

The Keynote was presented by Noah Falstein. He focused on game design in his talk.  He also talked about The 400 Project which is trying to create a certain number of rules (400) around game design.  The list is currently up to 112.  Take a look at the list if you are designing any games it is always good to keep these things in mind when designing a game or a level.

The first session of the final day was a panel session with Nolan Bushnell and Noah Falstein on “How did we get here”.  This was a fantastic session and I learned quite a bit just hearing these two guys chat.

I then attended the “Not losing your balance: making gameplay fair” from a couple of developers that worked on Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution.

The last session I attended before leaving was Serious Games in Management and Commerce.  I had just started my GlobalCove Technologies company and one of the areas we want to become more involved in is Serious Games.  All of these talks were excellent.

The conference was a huge success.  I learned a lot and was able to meet a lot of talented people.  The best part was it only 300 miles away from my home instead of 3,000.  Typically I have to head to the west coast to attend a game developer conference like this.  I’ll be going back next year.

Chad Carter 2 Comments

Positive Discontentment

Discontentment is a bad thing.  We should be content with what we have.  No need to envy what someone else has.  No need to keep up with Joneses.  No need to buy that new gadget just because someone else has one.

However, there are times when discontentment is a good thing.  We should always strive to better ourselves.  We should try to be better parents and spouses.  We should try to be better developers.  We should try to be better people.  So, in that sense, we should never be content with where we are.  I’m not suggesting we should always be looking down on ourselves.  Instead we should be happy with the things we have accomplished but never be satisfied with staying where we are.

So if you haven’t picked up a good book in a while, do so.  Spend some time building your relationships and never stay content with your achievements in life.

Keep learning, keep striving and keep achieving.

Chad Carter 1 Comment

Red Dead Redemption Effect

So as I was learning some things about jQuery the other week I ran across this Tetris example. In the available JavaScript source code the author had a link to watch out for the Tetris Effect. I thought maybe the Wikipedia link would discuss the number of lawsuits that that occurred from people using Tetris game play over the years. Instead it said that “the Tetris effect occurs when people devote sufficient time and attention to an activity that it begins to overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. … People who play Tetris for prolonged amount of time may then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street.”

This immediately made me think of Red Dead Redemption.

I put some hours into that game on my Xbox 360 and every time I saw a bird in the air I wanted to shoot it out of the sky. I typically don’t consider myself a violent person, but yet this game made me want to shoot at fowl so I could see them spiral to the ground.

I have experienced the Tetris Effect before when playing Crackdown and thinking about the orbs that would look great on that skyscraper downtown. Or when playing Assassins Creed thinking about all the places the flags could be placed.

That last game I have spent any significant amount of time on was Red Dead Redemption. Now there are two additional expansion packs available. I was looking forward to the multiplayer dice and card games but I haven’t fired it up in a while. There are a lot of good games coming out in November, not even considering the whole Kinect sensor and it’s launch titles. Recently, everyone has been talking about Halo Reach and Sid Meier’s Civilization V.

I hadn’t picked up Borderlands before, but yet for the PC it was less than eight bucks last week!  Still, I have refrained from any of these games because I’m holding out for Assassins Creed Brotherhood. I really enjoyed the first two games and am looking forward to the multiplayer addition to Brotherhood.

I would enjoy spending more time playing games, but that is playing and not working. I’m not good enough to compete in game tournaments so it remains a recreation. I’d prefer to play a good game than to go see a movie or watch a TV series. So gaming is definitely a much better entertainment experience for me than just about anything else I can think of. However, the bills need to be paid and so a limit has to be put on entertainment. But when I am not refraining from playing a game, I end up with the “Tetris Effect” of whatever game I’m putting hours into.

If you happen to be looking for that next Xbox 360 game, you can save 30% every week on a featured Xbox game at the Microsoft Store.

Happy Gaming!

Chad Carter 3 Comments